Mars rover Opportunity spots WALL-E in crater ramble NASA's Mars rover Opportunity snapped a dramatic photo of itself roaming around the planet's Endeavour Crater today. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ The image caught the clear shadow of the hardworking robot, which to our wise eyes on the Vulture space desk looks a bit like the cute movie character …
I like the way they refer to "about 5pm" local time - wondered what they hell they meant for a bit.
It happens that the Mars day is 24h 39m long, so it sort of makes sense, but if it had alternatively been 4000h long they'd have had to find a better way of describing when they made their picture.
I assume it's "between about 4:30 and 5:00 p.m" because it took several pictures over half a half hour period.
If the day was 4000 hours long then I suppose late afternoon would be something like "between 1620:30 and 1621pm local time". (Assume you still bother with am and pm)
Mind you a 166 hour long lunch would be nice addition to any Friday.
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." -- Douglas Adams.
- the am/pm time format isn't compatible with planets where a day lasts less than 12 hours.
You may want to rethink that, and ponder the meaning of the 'm'. Hint: it's to do with the middle of the day; the moment your local star is highest over your local horizon. Whether that's just a few earth minutes after sunrise, years or even ages, unless your planet's rotation is exactly in sync with its orbit, your 'meridiem' will be there. If your planet is synced you will have to travel to lunch if you're not there already.
Hardly what I'd call dramatic! Interesting maybe, not dramatic.
@time on mars, they could still divide the 4000 earth hour long local day into 24 giving them local hours, it'd just mean a "local" hour would last 166 earth hours, it just would'nt be so accurate, though giving local minutes and seconds and maybe tenths/hundredths of a second would help narrow it down!
"In order to give the mosaic a rectangular aspect, some small parts of the edges of the mosaic and sky were filled in with parts of an image acquired earlier as part of a 360-degree panorama from the same location."
It's a fake. We never went to Mars at all. That pic was taken in the Mojave Desert somewhere.
At what point of interplanetary exploration do you think the yankss will begin to comprehend that our concepts of nations and nationalism are utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things? You would have thought pictures from another planet would maybe provide some perspective, but no.
"concepts of nations and nationalism are utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things?"
Everything human is meaningless in the grand scheme (whatever that is) including you. That doesn't make them worthless. like it or not , humans are tribal animals and that is never going to change.
WALL-E was patterned (strongly) after the "Johnny 5" robot in the earlier film, "Short Circuit." It is not a "Disney/Pixar" design.
I have great respect for the Pixar folks who happily admit their inspirations but none at all for Disney who has been ripping off the public treasury of tales, slapping their name in front of it and promoting it as if it were their own original creation since the 1940's.
Local classical music station ran a program about movies using unattributed classical compositions to make their "own" movie music. Guess which company supplied most of the examples? The melody of "Hi-ho, hi-ho it's off to work we go ...." was written by Mozart. Yes, that Mozart.
As one noted, and I add that you young Hu-Persons (stupid political correct name for de-tailed apes) have poor memories of a great character...
There is so much Johnny 7 in that shadow (Tall, Dark and... Squarish)...
And so little 'what's his name' (short, odd-eyed and shortish)...
Nothing like the shadow of 'the squat one' that was drawn, mostly the shadow of the real one in hard metal.
(I am not dis-allowing, that there may have been the old "I never forget a face, but I suck at names" error, just to allow for gray matter loss.) Spelling/Grammar not included...
I'm surprised by how colorful that picture is. I guess you can blame it on film and TV, but I expect everything to be a shade of red when looking at images from Mars.
*note to devs, why is the spell checker insisting I use the US spelling of 'colourful'? This is a UK site.
The page at http://www.ominous-valve.com/pancam.html has a list of the filter specs.
Why would you want to limit yourself to the limited gamut and issues that go with a Bayer filtered CCD image, when, with the right filters and optical elements you can image all the way from near ultraviolet to deep infrared?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
